Without Tesla's vision and brilliance, our car wouldn't be possible. We're confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our 100 percent electric car and nod his head with both understanding and approval.

CEO Elon Musk, who was not involved in the founding of the company, has told PBS he counts Thomas Edison, a Tesla rival, as a personal hero, along with Winston Churchill.

Musk does have love for Tesla, though, pledging last year to donate to a project to turn the inventor's old lab into a museum, according to Jalopnik.

Some of his ideas never came to fruition, including a "death-beam." In July 1934, he told the New York Times he had invented a way to "send concentrated beams of particles through the free air," powerful enough to bring down 10,000 planes from 250 miles away, or kill millions of soldiers.

All in all, Tesla was a very cool dude. He hung out with Albert Einstein when they and other scientists took a tour of a wireless station in New Jersey, in 1921: